Barry Childs-Helton HoF

Barry passed the height limit for astronauts in seventh grade, but never lost the yen for space travel. He started writing science-fiction-tinged folk-rock in college -- though unaware, as yet, of the filk tradition. He emerged from grad school at Indiana University (M.A. in creative writing and Ph.D. in folklore), found his way into filking, and eventually settled into subsidizing his musical pursuits by editing computer books.

He and co-conspirator/spouse Sally began going to cons in 1982; their first fannish activity as a creative team was as masquerade costumers. Then Midwestern Filk Grandmistress Juanita Coulson invited Barry to join an onstage bardic semicircle at InConJuncTion V; he's been fusing SF, folk-rock, and space travel (with all the blues and jazz he could muster) ever since, often with Sally's percussion and a vintage Guild 12-string.

The Childs-Heltons released two studio filk recordings in the heyday of the chromium-dioxide cassette, a live CD with the Black Book Band in the 1990s, and (so far) three CDs with Wild Mercy (the third, Dream of a Far Light, is Barry's space-migration song cycle, which the band premiered live at Marcon 43; a fourth, Rising Road, is in the works).

As the filk community knows by now, earlier Pegasus nominations for his musical activities (as songwriter, band member, and performer) have only served to encourage him; he'll play to fannish audiences for as long as he can pick up a guitar. His 2015 solo CD of newly recorded early songs (which he characterizes as "English-major folk-rock from the analog era with aerospace motifs") is The Summers Behind You on Dragon Scale Records.